Subject: [bug#39258] [PATCH v3 1/3] guix: Generate package metadata cache.

From: Pierre Neidhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2020 16:54:36 +0200

Hi Ludo!

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

> It’s complicated.  As it stands, I’d rather not add overhead to ‘guix
> pull’, especially since current ‘guix search’ on my SSD is fast enough
> and can hardly be made any faster.

The question is, what is fast enough?  I have an NVMe here that has a
throughput of some 2GB/s, and yet

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
time guix search emacs > /dev/null
real    0m1.545s
user    0m1.938s
sys     0m0.080s
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

on a hot cache, which is too slow in my opinion :p

Mildly impatient users might be slightly discouraged from iterating
search queries.

It also makes `guix search` very impractical to use in (non-guile)
script.  Which is too bad considering that the recsel-formatting makes
`guix search` a very good candidate for scripting.

Cheers!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/